Linux on Power: A winning combination

IBM is honored to be recently recognized by readers of the Linux Journal as the winner of the “Best Linux Server Vendor” category in the 2013 Readers’ Choice Awards — for the third year in a row. Linux is important to many businesses for its ease of access, application and platform compatibility, and ultimately the value, as well as its robust and active community. This recognition demonstrates the value of IBM’s continued commitment to industry-leading collaboration and revolutionary technology, and Linux on Power is a critical component of that commitment.

I have been visiting with clients over the last several months, and they have shared their excitement about the bold moves we’re taking to make Power Systems the most open platform in the industry — from the OpenPOWER Consortium to scripting language optimization to active community involvement. Linux is central to our open movement, and recently, IBM announced a $1B investment in Linux for IBM Power Systems, which includes a strong network of support for clients, developers and our partners through five new Power Systems Linux Centers around the world and expanding a cloud-based Power development platform.

We also introduced integrated facilities for Linux on Power, commonly called IFLs, which allows clients to run Linux workloads on existing Power Systems and run them side by side with their AIX and/or IBM i workloads. This brings together the system of engagement with the system of record for tighter and faster linkages resulting in lowered costs, improved performance and simpler systems management.

Linux on Power is a winning combination and one which clients are embracing for their mission-critical workloads and cloud computing environments. It’s the technology inside Power Systems, including secure and flexible virtualization, advanced multi-threaded cores, high bandwidth IO and large data caches, that offers important differentiation when running new workloads, such as web, social and analytics.

Since the new systems are much more efficient, Pneuhage reduced the number of servers by more than 50 percent cutting down on floor space and power consumption considerably. In addition, it reduced database size by 70 percent, cut batch runtimes from hours to minutes, and improved application response times by up to 90 percent and database processing times by up to 94 percent.

Or, consider Dutch car servicing and repair company Kwik-Fit. It needed to support its growing customer base by improving its customer-facing website to enable online service scheduling and improve customer engagement. It also needed to boost the performance of its core database to handle the increasing volume of requests from across the business. The company chose a PowerLinux solution to support growth across all channels, including online and at its 180 branches. With this Linux solution, database performance has tripled, enabling Kwik-Fit to respond to over 200,000 online requests each year and support growth for the next four years.

It’s abundantly clear why infrastructures that are built to handle these types of advanced applications can make all the difference. I’ve seen this kind of value demonstrated in many of our clients’ environments and am excited to continue delivering the innovations to come based on Linux on Power.

Douglas (Doug) Balog, General Manager, Power Systems, is responsible for IBM’s worldwide Power server business and the IBM Power System franchise. Doug is also a member of IBM’s Performance Team (PT) and Strategy Team (ST), which focus respectively on tactical execution and the strategic direction for the IBM enterprise. Doug has been part of IBM’s Systems and Technology group for 30 years with product development leadership and brand leadership roles across System z, System x, BladeCenter, System Storage and now Power Systems. During that time, he has led major portfolio transformations across all of these brands to better align with clients’ needs and the market shifts.

The OpenPOWER Foundation continues to reveal innovations born from the open and collaborative partnerships that support the value proposition of market leadership through open innovation. Let’s consider the performance of HPC workloads on IBM POWER8 based data centric OpenPOWER solutions versus competitive platforms.

Innovation is constantly driving technological change and our services and products need to adapt accordingly. While cloud itself remains a hot topic within the IT industry, the truth is that there are so many different uses or use cases for cloud infrastructures that “the cloud” can and does mean many things to many different people.

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